We've watched police set their own cars on fire after knocking windows out and vandalizing them. Now we have this crew of police breaking into a jewelry store. You'll notice another cop standing guard. Looks like a routine occurrence.

There's a big crisis in the country that divides America across geographical lines. Heartland America is in the dark about police practices in the Big Cities. They encounter a generally responsible police force where they live. They project that experience onto the urban centers, where in reality it doesn't work that way.

Then there is a big public controversy over the nature of policing. In reality, the US has multiple policies, and the effect is dividing Americans over understanding the problems.

A car burns at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Tucker Boulevard on Tuesday, June 2, 2020.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt says St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner has not charged any of the people that St. Louis police officers have arrested during recent violent protests and, as a result, they've all been released.

"To see that kind of level of violence and rioting that went on, police officers being shot and shot at, a retired police captain being murdered, people throwing rocks and gasoline and frozen water bottles at police officers, firefighters being assaulted and blocked from doing their job, businesses that have served the community for years being burned to the ground, it's unfathomable that every single person arrested that night has been released.

"It is stunning."

In a recorded statement issued late Wednesday, Kim Gardner responded to Attorney General Schmitt's criticism over handling of arrests from riots on Sunday and Monday.

A statue of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi has been defaced in the US capital, with vandals spray-painting obscenities on the monument as heated protests carry on in the city. Police have yet to identify the culprits.

Photos of the statue circulated on social media on Wednesday, some appearing to show the words "rapist" and "racist" scrawled on its base in bright orange paint. The DC Park Police have launched an investigation, though few other details were made public, according to ANI.

Comment: There is no way to satisfy the ultra-liberal mob. Gandhi may have a dubious past, but he is also to be admired for what he did accomplish. All humans are flawed, and at the rate things are going, there will soon be NO monuments or statues remaining!

After George Floyd's death, Black Entertainment Television (BET) co-founder Robert Johnson called for massive reparations for slavery. He floated $14 trillion in "wealth distribution" to "create growth," but it's just blackmail.

Following the death of George Floyd and in the context of mass rioting, on Monday, BET co-founder Robert L. Johnson, the first black American billionaire, made the media rounds, calling for $14 trillion in reparations for the descendants of African-American slaves, or nearly $358,000 for every black American, as "atonement" for slavery.

"Now is the time to go big," he says, explaining the mind-boggling sum. "We need to focus on wealth creation... and to do that we must bring the descendants of slaves into equality with this nation."

Johnson's call for reparations is irresponsible and provocative during a time of widespread riots, muggings, shootings, and property destruction, the likes of which hasn't been seen in the US since 1968. He has been advocating for reparations since before George Floyd's death, but now, his call comes across as "either pay up or expect more rioting."

In my capacity as the general secretary of the Free Speech Union, I wrote to the chief executive of Ofcom, Dame Melanie Dawes, on 24 April to complain about its reprimand of Eamonn Holmes. According to the regulator, the breakfast television presenter had said something that 'could have undermined people's trust in the views being expressed by the authorities on the Coronavirus and the advice of mainstream sources of public health information'. Holmes's sin, in Ofcom's eyes, was to say on ITV's This Morning that any theory running counter to the official government line - such as the one linking 5G masts and Covid-19 - deserved to be discussed in the mainstream media. This was in spite of Holmes saying the 5G conspiracy was 'not true and incredibly stupid'. Ofcom said this view - the view that such theories deserved a public hearing, not that they were in any way right or plausible - was 'ill-judged and risked undermining viewers' trust in advice from public authorities and scientific evidence'.

In my letter to Dame Melanie, I pointed out that if Ofcom is going to prohibit views being discussed on television that might risk undermining viewers' trust in public authorities during this crisis, that could easily be extended to anyone challenging the government's official line on a number of issues, not just the link between the virus and 5G masts. For instance, would Ofcom have reprimanded a broadcaster that challenged the advice of Public Health England, issued on 25 February, that it was 'very unlikely that anyone receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected'? That advice was supposedly based on 'scientific evidence', yet as we now know it turned out to be wrong and the fact that hospitals discharged elderly patients back into care homes without first confirming that they were not infected with Covid-19 is one of the reasons that, according to the ONS, as of 1 May, 37.4 per cent of all Covid deaths in England and Wales have occurred in care homes.

Washingtonians are becoming increasingly unnerved by the sudden presence of unmarked militias who have been deployed to the streets of the US capital as protests rage, but who won't identify themselves to citizens and journalists.

Videos and photographs of the mysterious and heavily-armed figures have been swirling on social media for days, with many who have encountered them reporting that they refuse to say which government agency they are working for.

The anonymity of the forces has led some to suggest they look like armed "mercenaries" rather than government employees. One DC-dweller tweeted that the nation's capital felt like it was "under some sort of military occupation."

The customs service for Heihe in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province has said some 1.58 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas have been imported via the Power of Siberia pipeline over the past six months.

The 3,000km (1864 miles) cross-border pipeline started official deliveries of Russian natural gas to China in December. The so-called eastern route's capacity is 61 billion cubic meters of gas per year, including 38 billion cubic meters for export.

According to Xinhua News Agency, the pipeline enters China via the border city of Heihe and runs through nine provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions. It has also been connected with existing natural gas networks in China to allow the Russian natural gas supply to reach China's northeast, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and the Yangtze River Delta region.

There's nothing like a global health crisis to help the tech dream of business control freaks to rein in suspicious masses. A GCHQ-backed firm now offers vibrating wristbands for warehouse owners as a Covid social-distancing tool.

Just two years ago Amazon's patents for vibrating wristbands, which would track every worker and out those who slack, sent chills down people's spines, with visions of a dystopian future. Now, a similar device exists, in the plastic-and-electronic flesh - and is marketed as a tool to "accelerate the transition back to safe working across a range of industries" after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Manufactured by Tended, a company based in Lincoln, England, the wristbands had a relatively quiet rollout in May. Sensors in the devices use ultra-wideband technology for proximity detection that doesn't interfere with regular radio communications.

An open letter signed by hundreds of self-styled health 'experts' touts "protests against systemic racism" as not only Covid-19 safe but "vital to the national public health" - while protests against lockdowns remain deadly.

Calling "white supremacy" a "lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to Covid-19," the letter - signed by upwards of 1,200 self-declared public health professionals before it was closed to signatures on Tuesday, supposedly because "alt-right messages" had been added - trumpets the necessity of continuing the protests that began after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, pandemic be damned.

Despite months of warnings that getting within six feet of another human being will invariably result in infection and likely death, the letter proclaims that "as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for Covid-19 transmission." Posted in final form on Wednesday, it outlines a series of "safest protesting practices" - providing masks, hand-washing stations and hand sanitizer to demonstrators, for example - while stressing that its approval of the nationwide anti-racism protests "should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-at-home orders."

Comment: Doctors. With honorable exceptions, they are a dangerous subgroup of the authoritarian branch. Maintain social distancing to the greatest possible extent.